Are you as smart as a 19th century fifth grader?
How about their eighth grader level?
If you are concerned about the "dumbing-down" of education, this site has pertinent information for you. Prepare to be surprised about the extent of the dumbing-down!

Adults in that era had the moral attitude that adults should set a good example. Thus children in that era were taught this now-little known cigarette toxicity fact, its causing brain damage. In 1914, that was a fact already then known for over three centuries!! since at least 1603! Smoker brain damage includes abulia (impaired will power, ethical controls, and impulse control) and dyscalculia (impaired arithmetical ability).

Henry Ford of Ford Motor Company followed Edison's advice. So Ford did not suffer from the modern astronomical anti-competitive cost factor caused by smoking-caused health care costs. Note the bad modern example of $10,000 per employee (!!) health care costs, being suffered by General Motors! "Deutsche Bank estimates health care costs GM [General Motors] $10,000 annually for each employee," cited in "GM hit by $1.1B in red ink," by Ed Garsten, The Detroit News, p 2 (19 April 2005).

Henry Ford in 1914 paid personally for circulating tens of thousands of copies of Edison's letter to Michigan schoolchildren. Such educational data was deemed plain talk on cigarette hazards to inform that era's youth.

Ford circulated to children the Edison letter as an introductory page in his book, The Case Against The Little White Slaver. Nowadays, as education is sharply deteriorated, this wouldn't be possible even with adults; long preliminary explanation, using simplified words, "dumbing-down," is nowadays needed! to explain what was a basic back then, and without assurance that the adult will even be able to comprehend!!

Back then, such type data including at Ford's p 27, etc., the already long-known cigarette role in crime (see detailed background, had been known since pre-1836). Ford also cited several 'no-smokers-hired' policy examples, pp 33-34. Children of that era were our grandparents or great-grandparents. As education was far superior back then, they in 1914 knew far more than most adult Americans (in the 21st century, 2008) know on this subject.

Immediately after Edison wrote, a book appeared in 1915 with a section discussing not hiring smokers, saying, e.g., “Cigarette users are unsafe. I would just as soon think of getting my employees out of the insane asylum as to employ cigarette users.”—Quoting a railroad official, E. H. Harriman, in the book by Miami University Botany Professor Bruce Fink, Tobacco (Cincinnati: The Abingdon Press, 1915), p 49. And see his Chapter 6, “The Attitude of Business Toward Tobacco,” pp 45-52.

In fact, before Edison, in 1898, in the Spanish American War, the U.S. government, the Army, would not hire, enlist, smokers! This is a fact cited in court that year! in the Austin case. The military knew smokers' notoriously diseased condition! Don't assume Edison was a pioneer in not hiring smokers. He wasn't!

Children back then were taught science in school. Children back then were taught enough science to know more on the cigarette subject in 1889, than most adults do now, even ones with so-called "advanced degrees."

Children understood Edison in 1914, about tobacco and brain damage. Then this knowledge became censored. Tobacco pushers and their media shill accessories pushed the story that smoking is merely a “habit.” Years, decades, generations, went by, with this myth being the only story most people ever heard on-point.

Eventually, years later, the tobacco-caused brain damage data was “rediscovered”! Note the “rediscovery” reference by government writer Prof. Jerome H. Jaffe, M.D. (Columbia University), in “Tobacco Use as a Mental Disorder: The Rediscovery of a Medical Problem,” in the government book, Research on Smoking Behavior: NIDA Research Monograph 17, pp 202-217 (HEW, Washington, D.C.: December 1977).

Subject-matter scholars thought in December 1977 that this censorship policy might be overcome, and that once the public knew smoking is a mental disorder, not a habit, that would have a major impact on the public's perception of smokers ("a profound effect upon the reputation of this behavior"!), thus restore to adult awareness what their ancestors knew as children!

Tragically, the censorship policy was not overcome, and most all references the public sees or hears on the subject, still in 2008 refer to tobacco use as mere 'habit' or, at most, an 'addiction.' The terms "mental disorder" and "brain damage" are carefully avoided; the public is not to know! is the 'bottom-line' of the censorship policy.

However, educated people know, and the goal is to render everyone an educated person on this subject, no longer susceptible to the widespread disinformation.

Tobacco companies deny the hazard! They say THEY do NOT know there is a hazard! (You say, they are lying, committing fraud, denying informed consent. You are right.)
But the point is, medical studies regularly show that adult smokers typically are deceived by the pushers! and are UNAWARE of any hazard, most remaining in this state of unawareness until death.
The rare exceptions you may have heard of, are just that,rare exceptions, on the order of being hit by lightning!Solution: as shown below, education as per the 19th century high level, on tobacco dangers; enforcing the Michigan cigarette law; enforcing Constitutional pure air rights; and criminal prosecutions for tobacco-caused deaths.

In that era, medical science, emphasizing prevention, was conquering smallpox, plague, yellow fever, etc. Confidence was high that life-style diseases (e.g., those from tobacco) could soon be the next eliminated.

This was in the era when business, the clergy, and members of both major political parties had a united coalition against smoking. They knew that smoking is a moral issue (only secondarily, a health issue) due to its link to
alcoholism, crime,
SIDS, abortion,
promiscuity, etc.

Readers then could understand why smokers throw cigarette butts all over; could understand the explanation by James L. Tracy, M.D., 23 Med Rev of Reviews (#12) pp 815-820 (Dec 1917), saying "Tobacco intoxication is an egotistic narcosis. Tobacco makes the user feel like parading the narcosis and the manner and act of taking the narcotic. The narcosis is a grandeur narcosis. It is intrusive and obtrusive . . . most intolerant of restraint . . . ." [Quoted; Examples:
1,
2,
3,
4,
5,
6,
7,
8,
9,
10,
11,
12]. Now, in the dumbed down era, 2008, we often see whiny "letters to editor" wondering the "why"! 'oh, why do smokers spew cigarette butts'?! The 'grandeur narcosis' answer was long ago discovered, known, reported, published!

Are you grasping that education has been deliberately dumbed down? by people with strong intense motive to do so? See examples below.

In that century-ago bygone high education era, people could still understand the moral message about adults setting a right example for children. That concept of adults setting a right example is an incomprehensible one today, tiraded against amongst media and politicians as a "rights violation"! See instances of that era's pro-adult-right-example writings (1833-1916):

In that better-educated era, many people knew that smoking is not an "informed consent" ("choice") matter. Nowadays, as education has been dumbed down, many adults do not even know the meaning of the word "choice," much less, of the term "informed consent"! They definitely do not know that "consent" cannot lawfully be given for oneself being harmed or injured, much less, killed! See the 58 ALR3d 662-667 case list.

In 2006: "By the end of eighth grade, our [U. S.] students are two years behind" other countries, says Prof. William Schmidt (Michigan State University), quoted by Stephen Bitsoli, "Can U.S. Students Make Gains in Math, Science?," Macomb Daily (26 March 2006), p 2C. "In most of the better-performing countries, middle school is a time for learning algebra and geometry. Here, 'it's mostly arithmetic,' Schmidt said." U.S. schools "lag behind in coherence, focus and rigor. . . . mathematics isn't a random series of specialties, such as algebra, geometry, calculus. There is a logical order, from the simpler to the more complex, and the curriculum in most U.S. schools doesn't reflect this. It's arbitrary, with more complex, mathematically difficult concepts sometimes taught before simpler ones, confusing and frustrating students," p 6C.

Nowadays, compared to Edison and his era, education has been so dumbed down that high school graduates, college, and graduate school "graduates" do not know as much science on this subject, as did grade school children of the 1885-1914 era. Wherefore, too many people nowadays do not, and CANNOT, understand Edison's letter referencing acrolein, and brain damage, and not hiring smokers, as reprinted above.
Solution: Let's require that to receive a high school diploma, would-be graduates must be able to understand and explain

indeed, must achieve at the 1894 high school curriculum levelAnyone who can't do that (doesn't know as much science, that much law, that much generally, as children of the 1850-1914 era), would not graduate.
The individual would have to remain in school until he/she can understand the Edison paper, and the Lincoln speech, and can explain them articulately, verbally and in writing. (Of course, the goal is that all students would understand, so it'd be needed to require teachers to teach the material until the graduation applicants could graduate. We don't need more uneducated-on-science and basic Citizenship Legal Concepts, people around than we already have!)

Next, see the following example of education of a mere century ago.

Examples of 1890's EraHigh School and College Classes(First, The Introduction,Then Some Depth!)

Latin
Arithmetic
Latin Composition
French
Greek and Roman History [Context]

12th Grade (Oct 1897-June 1898)

German
Physics
Algebra
Geometry
Astronomy
Greek
Latin

College Freshman (Oct 1898-June 1899)

French
German

Goethe

Schiller

History 476 AD - 1799 AD
English Composition

Milton's Poems and Areopagitica

English Literature
French Literature

Corneille

Moliére

Racine

Alfred de Musset

Saine-Beuve

Balzac

Mérimée

Victor Hugo

College Sophomore (Oct 1899-June 1900)

English Composition
Bible as English Literature
Odes of Horace
Latin Comedy

College Junior (Oct 1900-June 1901)

Economics
Elizabethan Literature

Shakespeare
History of Philosophy

Reading List

Little Lord FauntleroyThe Scarlet Letter (age 8)
Greek HeroesLaFontaine, Fables (English, later, in French)
Hawthorne, Wonder Book and Bible StoriesLamb, Tales from ShakespeareDickens, A Child's History of EnglandThe Arabian NightsThe Swiss Family RobinsonThe Pilgrim's ProgressRobinson CrusoeLittle WomenHeide (English, later, in German)
The Jungle BookWild Animals I Have KnownHomer's Aeneid and IliadGreen, History of the English PeopleEmerton, Middle AgesGoethe, Faust (in German)
Le Medécin Malgré LuiThe Chambered NautilusIn School DaysLaus Deo (recited it)
A Boy I KnewBirdie and Her Friends (pre-1879 book), containing story by Margaret Canby, The Frost Fairies (read aloud to child at age 8; followed by an accusation of the child plagiarising it nearly verbatim at age 12! when the truth was, the child had simply remembered it, internalized it, memorized it, made it her own!)

Boat rowing and sailing
A Sample Test Question: "Give an Account of Hus and His Work"
How Diamonds Are Mined (1893)
1892, age 12, wrote an article for magazine publication, Youth's Companion* "Edmund Burke's On conciliation with the colonies [22 March 1775, Works 1:464-471], not the easiest work of thought and rhetoric for adolescents, was widely taught in high schools. And discussed and debated. Today it's seldom read even in 'universities,'" says Prof. Paul Fussell, Ph.D., Doing Battle: The Making of a Skeptic (Little, Brown, 1996), p 12. (Review; 2) (Chapter 1).

The above data is from Helen Keller's, The Story of My Life (1902), particularly chapters 13-21. Wasn't that impressive, how much that student was assigned to study?

It may help you put this in perspective, to know one more fact about that student.

That student was Helen Keller (1880-1968). Due to disease, she had become blind and deaf at age 19 months.

Yes, she did all that studying while she was blind and deaf. She did more, blind and deaf, than many do now, seeing and hearing.

She had become deaf and blind at age 19 months. It was not until some years later before her parents were able to arrange some education for her, which began around age 7. So she had a late start, about two years late, on her education even beginning, later than most people now.

Teachers trained to tutor the blind and deaf were retained when she was age 7. They began reading to her by signing on her hand and arm. She had to learn that first. That took some time.

A significant reading program did not begin until she was about age 8.

She still could not speak.

It was not until she was age 10, March 1890, that she spoke her first sentence. That was, "It is warm."

As the reading list above, shows, she made substantial progress thereafter!—more than many people nowadays, who don't have such a long delay before they can even start their learning process.

Reading lists of this type were in the pre-homework era; schools existed to teach, to have students memorize VAST quantities in breadth and depth, and had the students read and study on-premises. At home, students did parental assignments, not school work.

[Now in the dumbed-down era, anti-educators and anti-teachers have abolished the vast memorization concept, in favor of 'happy happy' concepts, and purporting to develop 'understanding.' Our more highly educated ancestors opposed this dumbed down approach, knew that providing, teaching, requiring learning of, vast quantities of data is best, with 'understanding' to come later, after the knowledge assimilation process and the practicalities and experiences of life.]

At age 22, Helen Keller wrote her autobiography (1902). Have you written any books? Do you know anyone who has?
And she updated it as Midstream: My Later Life (1929).

Keller's autobiography of course did not list all that she had been taught and had learned in that short time. Note her subsequent saying, "People do not like to think. If one thinks, one must reach conclusions. Conclusions are not always pleasant," quoted from Jonathan Kozol, The Night Is Dark and I Am Far From Home: A Political Indictment of the U.S. Public Schools (Oct. 1975), p 101.

A textbook from that era is Sanders' Fifth Union Reader: Principles of Rhetorical Reading, by Charles M. Sanders, A.M. (New York and Chicago: Ivison, Blakeman, Taylor & Co, 1867)
See uses of a classic education, as applied by Charles Sumner, in 1840's - 1860 anti-slavery and anti-war context.
And see Lincoln's 1854 Peoria Speech for basic legal concepts that Northerners widely understood, and which we fought a war to defend against early anti-educationists (Confederates).Back then, 1830's - 1860's readers could easily comprehend classic references, and languages, how they are used, and their meaning-in-context. See references to

distinguishing “book-law [from] the rule of actual practice,” cited by Abraham Lincoln, Peoria Speech (1854), p 221, referring to the "common law" and Blackstonian "Natural Law" concepts that everyone (including children) then understood in its fundamentals, and now is almost unknown, even ignored by judges from time to time! (Example: Then children could understand slavery unconstitutionality pre-Thirteenth Amendment, now an unknown fact! And think of the gross ignorance of the rights to pure air and put out fires!)
Reader, do YOU know from your education, these classic references? and legal concepts?!
In that same time period, Abraham Lincoln “probably the greatest writer among American Presidents [had studied] “the powerful beauty of the King James version of the Bible [and] as a youth . . . books on elecution, grammar, and rhetoric that were, in some important respects, superior to many of today's school books in teaching clear, eloquent and convincing language.”—Robert L. Polley, Lincoln: His Words and His World (Waukesha, Wis., Country Beautiful Foundation, for Hawthorn Books, New York: 1965), p 9. See also Lincoln's anti-aggression-war speech and his anti-slavery speech.
Note the education of the child Elizabeth Tudor (1533-1603): “history, geography, astronomy, mathematics and music . . . translated Greek and Latin for recreation [no dumbed down TV for her!] . . . wrote poetry and composed prayers that were printed and sold for popular consumption . . . one of her earliest literary efforts, a long religious poem that she translated from the French. . . . Elizabeth explains that she worked at 'joining the sentences together as well as the capacity of my simple wit and small learning could extend themselves.' She was 11 at the time.” That volume too was printed in “a bound edition” now at “the Folger exhibition.”
This data is cited by Doug Stewart, “Reign On!,” Smithsonian, pp 64-72 (June 2003).
For more on Queen Elizabeth I's education, see Elizabeth Jenkins, Elizabeth the Great (New York: Coward-McCann, 1958): "Greek, Latin . . . history, geography, mathematics, the elements of architecture and astronomy and four modern languages: French, Italian, Spanish and Flemish" (p 19); "New Testament in Greek . . . Sophocles . . . hours translating works from one foreign language into another and conversing with [teacher] on intellectual topics in all the languages in turn" (p 34). Reason: "It is an unerring rule and one of universal application, that a Prince [government official, or voter in self-governing societies] who is not wise [educated] himself cannot be well advised by others" (p 63).
Note the love of reading of King Albert of Belgium, typically two books a day, says Barbara W. Tuchman, The Guns of August (New York: Dell Paperback, 1962).
Note the education of the Scottish boys James Hutton (1726-1797) and David Hume (1711-1776) as reported by Jack Repcheck, M.A., The Man Who Found Time: James Hutton and the Discovery of the Earth's Antiquity (Perseus Pub, 2003), pp 59-60 and 63: "in November 1740 [Hutton] entered the University of Edinburgh . . . only fourteen, but that was the normal age to begin college at that time. David Hume . . . was only eleven when he started . . . ." Curriculum included Latin, Greek, logic, metaphysics, and natural philosophy (science). P 60: "Students paid the lecturer a fee . . . each course . . . . Thus, a professor had a strong incentive to develop a reputation as a fine speaker so that he could fill the lecture hall, and then his pockets." P 63: "Hutton graduated from the university in the spring of 1743 . . . appears [he] passed his years there rather uneventfully, which is what one would expect given his young age—even the precocious David Hume graduated from the University of Edinburgh at the age of fourteen without any of his professors noticing his presence among them.”
Note the education of little Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896), as cited by Noel B. Gerson, Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Biography (New York: Praeger Pub, 1976), pp 12, 16-18, and 85. P. 12: “Philosophy and languages, among them Latin, French, and Italian . . . poetry.” P. 16: “mathematics . . . painting and drawing.” “In 1828 she was offered the post of headmistress of the small academy for females being established” but declined. P 17: “rhetoric.” “By the time she was twenty-one, she . . . had become a full-time teacher. . . . acute as an art critic [she did] teach drawing and painting, along with other subjects. ”
P. 18: “thanks to her reading . . . she occasionally referred to such subjects as Italian architecture, French natural philosophy, and English jurisprudence.” P. 85: Intelligently discussed “about navigation, the relative merits of various types of ships, and the schooling of seamen.” (In 1853, she became author of Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin).
Note the education of little John Quincy Adams (later U.S. President) cited by David McCullough, John Adams (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001), pp 259-260 and 324: “university lectures were conducted in Latin,” he was to study “law, medicine, chemistry and philosophy,” “several volumes of Pope, and a fine edition of a favorite Roman author, Terence, in both Latin and French” [p 259]; “Latin and Greek” [p 260]; “His French was virtually perfect . . . broadly read in English and Roman history . . . English and French poetry . . . 'He has translated Virgil's Aeneid . . . the whole of Sallust and Tacitus' Agricola . . . a great part of Horace, some of Ovid, and some of Caesar's Commentaries . . . besides Tully's [Cicero] Orations . . . In Greek his progress has not been equal; yet he has studied [p 324] morsels of Aristotle's Politics, in Plutarch's Lives, and Lucian's Dialogues, The Choice of Hercules in Xenophon, and lately he has gone through several books in Homer's Iliad . . . the geometry in the Preceptor, the eight books of Simpson's Euclid in Latin . . . plane geometry . . . algebra, and the decimal fractions, arithmetical and geometrical proportions . . . the differential method of calculations” [p 325]. He was then age “seventeen” [p 324].
Back then, in that more educated era, when people actually appreciated education, we can see what people did for fun. It wasn't mind-deadening hours and hours of television! Here is an example of John Quincy Adam's father, John Adams, reading for pleasure: “as always, he read much of every day—old favorites in Latin, Greek, and French, English poetry and history,” p 385.
Note the education, “Scripture, Latin, Greek, French, German, Russian and Slavonic, mathematics, history, physics, and geography . . . logic,” as tested c. May 1887 (result: 11 'A's and 1 'B') of the Russian boy Vladimir Ulrich Ulyanov (22 April 1870 - 21 January 1924), cited by Robert Payne, The Life and Death of Lenin (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1964), page 73
Note the education of the little German child Catherine the Great (1729-1796), recorded by Henri Troyat, Catherine la Grande (France: Flammarion, 1977; transl.
by Joan Pinkham, New York: E. P. Dutton, 1980).

At pages 4-5:
Assignments to study Religion, Music, German and French (well-enough to write her later memoirs in French; could you write yours in a foreign language, or articulately at all in any language?!),
Roman History (e.g., of Titus and Marcus Aurelius); to read authors Corneille, Racine, Molière, La Fontaine.

Page 72: on own, self-motivated to learn, not just sitting there, watching TV, waiting to be told!, she read: "the works of La Calprenède and Mademoiselle de Scudéry, Astrée by Honoré d'Urfé, Clovis by Desmarets . . . the works of Brantôme . . . Madame de Sévigné . . . Father Basse's General History of Germany at the rate of one volume a week, and Father Préfixé's History of Henry the Great [Henri IV]
. . . Voltaire . . . the four volumes of Bayle's Dictionary . . . precursor of the Encyclopedias."

Page 91: "the Annals of Tacitus . . . Voltaire's Essay on the Manners and Spirit of Nations and Montesquieu's The Spirit of Laws."
Does your child's so-called "school" teach near this level? !! :) and schools call the piece of paper they issue a "diploma"!! Yeah, right!

As more data is obtained on education from this period, this website material will be expanded. Especially of concern is education from grades 1-10, which Keller omitted to cite except as implicit in her author and reading lists. (Suggestions welcome, by email below).

It is evident how education has deteriorated. Keller's 1902 book, and the other cited references, gave author names or titles of readings, not necessarily both, as readers of that era were presumed educated and would know! Nowadays, this (for far too many people), is not the case at all: they don't know. That is why implementing the above suggestion for increasing graduation requirements is needful.

For more on U.S. high school requirements of the 1890's era, see, e.g.,

(1) National Education Association, Report of the Committee of Ten on Secondary School Studies (New York: American Book Co, 1894), pp 46-47;

*In any school in which Greek can be better taught than a modern language, or in which local public opinion or the history of the school makes it desirable to teach Greek in an ample way, Greek may be substituted for German or French in the second year of the Classical programme.

†National Education Association, Report of the Committee of Ten on Secondary School Studies (New York: American Book Co, 1894), pp 46-47. Reprinted in Edward A. Krug, The Shaping of the American High School, supra, pp. 59 and 61.

A modern analyst says “that [the past high school level] curriculum . . . is now about the level of a two-year college degree”—Linda Seebach (25 Feb 2002). (Context, "High School Graduates Fewer Than You Think" [16 Feb 2002]). As you learn here, she was far too kind!

Even though you may not be able to rescue the schools of your district, you may be able to rescue your own child, or yourself, from the deteriorated education (each full year providing only 1/3 year of education, forcing the child more and more behind each year). Ways to escape the deterioration include

(a) home schooling, and/or

(b) taking college-credit-level classes as soon as eligible and qualified to do so, and/or

(c) obtaining a G.E.D. as soon as eligible and qualified, then forthwith entering college, and/or

(d) independent study at the higher level, pursuant to the data reported in references such as, e.g.,
Prof. Adam Howard, Learning Privilege: Lessons of Power and Identity in Affluent Schooling (London: Routledge, 2007) ("Explores what educators, students and families at elite schools value most in education and how these values guide ways of knowing and doing that both create high standards for their educational programs and reinforce privilege as a collective identity. This book illustrates the ways that affluent students construct their own privilege." See also "Unlearning the Lessons of Privilege," Teaching Social Responsibility, Vol. 66(#8), May 2009.

Examples from Students' and Medical Books In That Era on Coverage of Tobacco Effects

"When we see a man whipping a good horse that is going fast enough, we feel angry. Now, the heart is like a willing horse. When it is making its seventy beats in a minute, it is going fast enough.

"It is unnecessary and foolish to use any thing that will act as a whip does on a horse, and make it beat faster. That is just what [tobacco] does.

"If it [the heart] is beating seventy times in a minute, a little [smoking] will often make it beat seventy-four or seventy-five times in a minute. Four or five beats in a minute make a great many extra beats in a day.

"All these extra beats are labor lost. They are using the strength, without doing a particle of good," p 46.

"The beats of a healthy heart are regular and steady, like the working of a steam-engine. When the heart is out of order, its beating is irregular and unsteady. One of the causes of such a condition is tobacco," p 47.

"When a doctor says that Mr. A or Mr. B has a 48‘smoker's heart,' he means that he has got his heart into this unsteady state by smoking or chewing tobacco," pp 47-48.

"Any bad smell in the air shows that there is something in it which ought not to be there. It is a sign of danger," p 104. "It is not good to breathe in a room full of . . . smoke," p 105.

"The body is like a clock, with its wheels, and its spring, and its hands, and its ticking. If we take the clock to pieces, to see what it is made of, that is like the study of Anatomy. . . . If we set the clock a-going, and watch it to see how it ticks and strikes, and turns its hands, that is like the study of Physiology. . . . When we have learned these things about our bodies, we shall know how they should be taken care of in order to keep them in health. This knowledge is called Hygiene. Many grown people are very ignorant of these things. They abuse their bodies, and wear them out in various ways. . . . smoking or chewing tobacco, are among the most common ways," p 10.

In that era, "the laws state that all pupils must receive instruction in this subject . . . the younger pupils who can not yet read a text-book must be taught orally . . . the more advanced pupils must have a simple text-book . . . the higher grades must have a book which . . . shall also give a knowledge of the elements of physiology and hygiene," p 5.

"In our study of Physiology and Hygiene, we need to learn how to take good care of the body so that it may grow to be well-formed and of full size. There are many ways in which we may injure the body and prevent its natural development . . . poor food . . . the use of injurious substances such as tobacco . . . . These substances are such powerful poisons that they injure every part of the body, especially the blood and nerves, and hinder the natural growth. Young persons are easily injured by chewing or smoking tobacco . . . .," p 21.

"While these substances are poisonous and injurious, it is true that the person who uses them may become so [brain-damaged] accustomed to their effect that he does not know [anosognosia] how much they are hurting him. Sooner or later, however, he will find out how evil they are, and it may then be too late to remedy their bad effects. . . . Young people need . . . good food instead of tobacco. . . . the habits that are fixed in youth are difficult to correct in later years. The appetite for tobacco . . . usually grows stronger with advancing life, so that the man who has formed such habits continues to be a slave to them. . . . Proper food and healthful exercise can do more than any thing else to promote our growth, while tobacco [is] to be shunned as evil, and only evil, to us," p 22.

"The nervous system, like all other parts [of the body], is dependent upon the blood for repair. Hence, it follows that faulty nutrition and impurity of blood result in nervous weakness. Impure air, by its effects on the blood, deadens the energies of the nervous system. . . . The nervous system suffers through imperfect respiration . . . . [Some] substances . . . taken as food, drink, or medicine, affect the nerves by paralyzing them . . . substances such as tobacco, opium . . . chloroform, and other articles of the same kind. . . . The nervous system and the mind are so closely related, that whatever affects one also affects the other. When the system is healthful and vigorous, mental action is most forcible and reliable. Whatever weakens the nervous system, or disturbs it, produces corresponding disturbances in the mind. What is known as insanity, in which case the judgment and reason are dethroned, is the result. . . .," pp 122-123.

"Intoxication is temporary insanity. It is not surprising that many repetitions of intoxication frequently lead to permanent forms of insanity. . . . Tobacco . . . is a poison. When chewed or smoked, its poisonous portion is absorbed by the blood and circulated through the system. Its effects are most fully shown in injury to the blood itself, and in paralysis of nervous force. Its influence on the nervous and muscular systems is so powerful that its use in medicine is regarded as too dangerous . . . Its use causes diseased conditions of the vital organs. The stomach, the liver, the heart, and the nervous centers suffer most from its use. The effects of tobacco blunt and degrade the mind. By its narcotic effects, its use fixes upon the system the most slavish conditions of the will. The person who permits himself to become addicted to its habitual use loses his power to stop the evil habit. No intelligent person who uses it, will advise another to begin the use of it," p 125.

"The use of tobacco is a pernicious habit in whatever form it is introduced into the system. Its active principle [ingredient], Nicotin, which is an energetic [strong] poison, exerts its specific effect on the nervous system . . . . the tone of the system is greatly impaired, and it responds more feebly to the influence of curative agents."

"Tobacco itself, when its use becomes habitual and excessive, gives rise to the most unpleasant and dangerous pathological conditions. Oppressive torpor, weakness or loss of intellect, softening of the brain, paralysis, nervous debility, dyspepsia, functional derangement of the heart, and diseases of the liver and kidneys are not uncommon consequences . . . . A sense of faintness, nausea, giddiness, dryness of the throat, tremblings, feelings of fear, disquietude [paranoia], and general nervous prostration must frequently warn persons addicted to this habit that they are sapping the very foundation of health. . . . The opium habit . . . is open to the same objections."

(Notice that opium is so far less a problem as to warrant only a one sentence reference! Yet post-gateway drugs are what politicians emphasize and fixate on—maliciously, with intent to harm society by focusing on post-gateway matters, on effects vs causation.
They know that the "natural and probable consequences" of their fixating on effects, is to misdirect societal attention off causation, thus promote the very evils such politicans often profess to oppose. Such politicians are evil, vile, depraved.
Notice that such politicians often oppose genuine prevention efforts. Examples: Supposedly anti-abortion / anti-drug politicians often SUPPORT tobacco, i.e., sabotage their professed goals.
For parallel 1998 confirmatory data, see Theodore A. Slotkin, Dep't of Pharmacology and Cancer Biology, Duke University Medical Center, "Fetal Nicotine or Cocaine Exposure: Which One is Worse?", 285 J Pharmacol & Experimental Therapeutics (#3) 931-945 (24 March 1998) [summary at our birth defects information site].

"Tobacco contains a sharp-tasting liquid called nicotine, which is a quick-acting and deadly poison. Because of this poison, the juice of the tobacco is never purposely swallowed; but in chewing, the saliva dissolves the nicotine, and a part of it is absorbed into the system; while in smoking, the nicotine in the smoke and vapor is absorbed 72by the saliva and the moist membranes of the mouth and nose, where it exerts all of its harmful effects . . .," pp 71-72.

"What has been said in the preceding lessons about the influence of alcohol upon the will power, applies with equal truth to such narcotics as tobacco and opium," p 73.

". . . heart action is increased when tobacco is being used . . . is due, not to stimulation of the heart, but to partial paralysis of the vagi nerves. From previous lessons you know that the vagi nerves hold the heart in check, causing it to reserve its power . . . if the vagi nerves are paralyzed, the heart beats rapidly, thus unnecessarily wearing itself out," p 161.

"The greatest care should be taken by those who have buildings in charge to insure their absolute freedom from all . . . harmful, and sometimes fatal, impurities of the air. . . .When a room is properly ventilated, the air should seem odorless to one coming in from out of doors," p 187.

"The free [repeated] use of either alcohol or tobacco may cause a very serious injury to the sight," p 235.

"In boys addicted to this (tobacco) habit I find a nervous irritability, and inability to do the work that properly belongs to boys of their age," p 250.

"The cells of the brain may become poisoned from tobacco. The ideas may lack clearness of outline. The will power may be weakened, and it may be an effort to do the routine duties of life. . . . The memory may also be impaired."—Dr. Albert F. Blaisdell, Our Bodies and How We Live (1904) (an elementary school textbook).
"Nicotine is a rapidly acting poison resembling hydrocyanic acid in its fatal effects," p 931. Page 1236 has this list entitled, "Some Good Reasons Why A Boy Should Not Smoke Tobacco":

"1st. Cigarettes or tobacco in any form hinders the growth and injures the nerves and health."

"2d. Cigarettes foster the tobacco habit, and may make any boy a slave to it."

"3d. The cigarette habit does not help a boy in his life work, and may prevent him from obtaining a good position in business."

"4th. Most all reliable business establishments refuse to employ boys who smoke cigarettes."

"5th. The following are among the poisons and drugs used in the manufacture of cigarettes: Arsenic, Creosote, Nicotine, Opium, Saltpetre, Tonca flavoring and Rum, all of which are harmful."

"6th. Cigarette smoking makes a boy dull and stupid, impairs his memory and prevents his advance in school."

"Tobacco . . . contains a very poisonous, volatile, oily liquid alkaloid, called nicotine. . . . Tobacco is a marked depressant nauseant, it produces emesis by irritation as well as by systemic action. Its continued use by smoking or chewing . . . produces granular inflammation of the mucous membrane of the mouth and pharynx, atrophy of the retina, dyspepsia, lowered sexual vitality, sudden faints, nervous depression, and cardiac irritability. Used by the young, it hinders the development of the brain, and interferes with metabolism in general . . . . It is claimed to produce cancer of the lips and tongue, blunting of the moral sense, mental aberration, and even insanity. The so-called ‘tobacco heart' induces many forms of nervous, painful, and oppressed cardiac action . . . ."

"Nicotine is one of the most deadly poisons known. The author remembers poisoning a cat with this agent in the pharmacy school. The animal at once became greatly excited, then there was a wild stare, a deep sigh, and sudden death within three minutes after the ingestion of the drug."

"There is no deadlier poison in nature than Nicotine. A drop or two of nicotine is sufficient to cause death. Like all poisons, it is highly stimulating for the instant, soon to be followed by its death-like effects. It is the peculiar poison which tobacco in any and all of its forms yields. The tobacco chewer, snuff taker, cigar smoker, and cigarette fiend . . . is simply administering poison to the vitals. . . . The boy or girl who uses tobacco before reaching maturity is sure to wreck the nervous system and take a long step toward idiocy or insanity. Perfect, clean, energetic and acceptable manhood or womanhood is impossible for a youthful tobacco poisoner. . . .," p 1485.

"It is to be doubted whether any sane adult ever deliberately learned the tobacco habit. . . . it is to be doubted whether a sane man exists who does not deprecate the habit and wishes he were rid of it," p 1486.

"No non-user of tobacco ever felt the worse or expressed regret over his abstention. No user of tobacco ever denied that the habit is—

1st. A filthy one, in that it begets frequent spitting of stained saliva by chewers, sickening smoke odors by smokers, and discharge of discolored mucous by snuffers. Add to this the disgustingly odorous smoke of the cigarette fiend, and then wonder what worse in the way of filth can be realized.

"3d. It is an expensive habit, often entailing poverty, and always diminishing the recompense of labor. In the families of those who earn meagre support its expensiveness is almost the equivalent of robbery of wife and children. Destitution lies in the wake of tobacco . . . .

"4th. It is an inconvenient habit and very often interferes with work . . . ," p 1486.

"The most common narcotic in use is probably tobacco . . . its excessive use in the cigarette form, as also in the ordinary ways of chewing, smoking, and snuffing, has a tendency to foster in the young inclinations destructive of a high moral tone," p 1488.

Pages 1487-1488 have this list entitled, "One Dozen Good Reasons Why A Boy Should Not Use Tobacco":

"1st. Cigarettes or tobacco in any form hinder the growth and injure the nerves and health."

"2d. Cigarettes foster the tobacco habit, and may make any boy a slave to it."

"3d. The cigarette habit does not help a boy in his lifework, and may prevent him from obtaining a good position in business."

"4th. Most all reliable business establishments refuse to employ boys who smoke cigarettes."

"5th. The following are among the poisons and drugs used in the manufacture of cigarettes: Arsenic, Creosote, Nicotine, Opium, Saltpetre, Tonca flavoring and Rum, all of which are harmful."

"6th. Cigarette smoking makes a boy dull and stupid, impairs his memory and prevents his advance in school."

Soon thereafter, a student was expelled from the Michigan teacher education program. The charge was smoking. Smoking was a recognized mental disorder matter. Mentally disordered persons were not allowed to become teachers. The expulsion of the student for smoking was upheld in court.

Instructions to Fifth Grade Teachers: "Assign a lesson on the effects of . . . tobacco to be studied from a hygiene textbook. Develop these points in class: Effects on growth: 1. Nervous system 2. Will power 3. Ability to do one's best," p 273. References:

Michael V. O'Shea, Ph.D., and John H. Kellogg, M.D., Making the Most of Life (New York: Macmillan Co, 1915), pp 166-172

Nowadays, adults, even adults with so-called "degrees," even so-called "doctorates," typically don't know these then simple basics-for-children! And even deny them!! No wonder the asylums and prisons are overflowing. And costs are soaring. And politicians' only remedy is more prison-building!! Thus "Michigan's prisons are bursting at the seams, sucking up precious state dollars at an alarming rate and could close to new inmates by fall," says the article "Prisons full by fall; now what?" (Detroit News, 19 Feb 2007). "The state is paying more for corrections ($1.94 billion) than it does for its 15 public universities ($1.78 billion)."

"While the toxic action of tobacco-smoke was thought to be due chiefly to nicotine, certain oxidation products, as collidine, pyridine, picoline, and other bases of the same series, besides ammonia and traces of ethylamine, must be considered in that connection. . . . The principal interest of tobacco to the physician centers in its poisonous effects."

A long-continued heavy use of tobacco produces chronic inflammation of the upper air passages (nasopharyngitis), indigestion, anorexia, cardiac irregularity, and palpitation (tobacco-heart), deafness, headache, giddiness, tremors, and other nervous symptoms due to congestion of the brain, spinal cord, and peripheral nerves.

This is a book for “the upper elementary grades.” “Have you ever seen the inside of a watch, or clock? If you have, you know that it takes a lot of delicate wheels with teeth that fit carefully into each other to make it go. If you threw sand into these wheels, you can easily guess that it would soon interfere seriously with their work. Your body is also a delicate machine. You want it to work smoothly and properly for you. Therefore you should not take things into the body or do thing that disturb its work. [Substances such as] tobacco have certain harmful effects upon the body. Their use can be likened somewhat to the throwing of sand into the wheels of a delicate machine. The parts are kept from working smoothly and well,” pp 16-17.

“Tobacco contains a poison called nicotine. The use of tobacco during the years of growth is also very much like throwing sand into the gears of a delicate machine. . . . In childhood and youth, when the different parts of the body are growing and becoming used to working together in the proper ways, all disturbing things should be avoided,” p 20.

“Tobacco contains a poison called nicotine. Even in small amounts it interferes with the normal working of the heart. Immoderate use of tobacco, especially in young people, excites the heart, and causes it to beat rapidly. The heart becomes fatigued, or tired. This is a dangerous condition, and should be avoided. Young persons should never smoke,” p 305.

“Tobacco is a plant which was unknown to the civilized world before the middle of the 16th century. . . . Tobacco contains a powerful poison called nicotine. A large part of the harm from smoking comes for the absorption of some of this nicotine into the body. . . . Tobacco smoke . . . contains some carbon monoxide gas and other substances in addition to nicotine. Tobacco smoking is irritating to the delicate lining of the air passages,” p 388.

“Tobacco makes the heart beat faster. . . . During the growing period of life, the use of tobacco is especially harmful. Tobacco disturbs the nervous system. It may cause headaches, trembling, and nervousness. Its effects upon the nervous system extend to the control of muscles [ataxia] and make smoking very harmful. . . . Smoking lessens strength and endurance. The shortness of breath that results from the use of tobacco is a big handicap . . . . The control of muscles by the nervous system is disturbed. As a result the persons are not so alert or quick as before, and they cannot do things with as much skill. Tobacco handicaps its users . . .,” p 389.

“Tobacco Interferes With Mental Work: Many experiments have been made to find out the effects of tobacco on mental work such as learning and memorizing things and following directions. They have shown that tobacco affects both the speed and accuracy of mental work. Persons using tobacco were found to make more mistakes in adding figures [acalculia] than persons who did not use it. The users of tobacco also learned new things less easily and tired more quickly at their work than those who did not use it. School marks show that smoking and successful school work do not go well together,” p 390.

An “employer knows that loafing too often goes with smoking and that the poisonous nicotine will keep him [the employee] from doing his best work. Smoking is annoying to many people. The smoker carries the unpleasant tobacco smell about with him on his skin and in his clothes. Then there is also the danger of fire from the careless handling of matches, cigarette stumps, and the hot ashes of tobacco. All these things are very likely to turn a careful employer away from the user of tobacco in favor of the one who does not use it,” p 391.

Concerning “the use of tobacco. Its harm to the body, its interference with good school work, and its effects upon the character of the user are . . . too great,” p 392.

“There is a form of slavery in the world today which might be considered as terrible or even worse than the slavery of old. It is the slavery to narcotic drugs. . . . The person who begins their use soon finds that more and more must be sued. . . . As a result, the user is a slave to drugs and will commit crimes . . . to keep supplied. . . . he will steal, lie, or even kill . . . You can easily see that it is about impossible for drug users to have much ambition, or even the ability, for doing worth-while things,” p 393.

"Tobacco was unknown to the civilized world up to the time of the discovery of America," p 122.

"There are a number of harmful drugs in tobacco, but the principal one is nicotine. . . . Sometime a doctor orders a person not to smoke . . . because the heart or the nerves have been injured by the drugs in tobacco. . . . Athletes are not allowed to smoke because of possible injury to the heart or to the breathing muscles. Many employers do not allow their employees to smoke while on duty." p 123.

"Suppose eyes, hearts, arms, and legs were for sale. What are some of the things you would look for in a heart if you were choosing one? . . . Do things last longer and give better service when they are given good care? What are some of the things to do to take care of a watch or a camera or a bicycle or any other of your belongings which you would find very difficult to replace? What are some of the things you can do to take care of your heart so that it will wear well?" p 126.

Test yourself; how many of the above could you identify, without the explanatory notes there?
Do you wish this site were not under construction, and all the notes were there?
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."—Thomas Jefferson.

Note the nature and quality of classic education in Greece:

"Primary schools had been known in the Greek world since at least the sixth century B.C., and the sophists [teachers] had done much to make more advanced education a conscious subject. Now [three centuries later] an integrated system of education became [in the third and fourth centuries B.C.] widespread, for schooling had two vital functions: to ensure that the young learned the Greek culture of their forebears and to meet the cultural needs of a more fluid, individualistic world. Literacy seems to have been [become] more common among rich and poor Greeks alike than ever before . . . . children learned to read, to write, and to 416count; physical education . . . was a very important element." says Prof. Chester G. Starr, A History of the Ancient World, 3rd ed (Oxford Univ Press, 1983), pp 415-416.

"Those students who could afford to go beyond primary level instruction . . . read and memorized Homer, Euripides, Menander, and other authors; learned grammar and composed moral essays; and studied geometry, the theory of music, and kindred subjects . . . . Greeks [living outside Greece were concerned to provide same quality education for their children, so they provided education] for the maintenance of ancestral moral values," says Starr, supra p 416.

"Hellenistic education was clearly designed to inculcate the fundamental virtues and skills of a governing class. . . . Vocational skills as such played no part; ethical training was, on the other hand, heavily emphasized. Above all this educational system was designed to produce deep acquaintance with inherited standards rather than to lead the young toward questioning experiment," says Starr, supra p 416.

Note the Ancient Greeks' emphasis on ethical and academic subject matter education in contrast with the modern 'dumbed-down' or 'trade-school' style of "education."

For an example of recruiting literature addressed to young men in the Civil War, to inspire them to sign up, see the book, Barbarism of Slavery (1860).
Test yourself; young men of military age, of that era, were expected to comprehend the material and references. Ask yourself, can you? If not, you have an example of deterioration in education.

For overviews of the deterioration of educators and education, and even at doctoral degree (Ph.D. etc.) level, see, e.g.,

"Textbook America" (Harper's Magazine, May 1980), by Walter Karp, citing the deliberate destruction of education. Genuine education was a "specter that had haunted Europe for a century: the danger of educating people beyond their station [trade, manual occupation], or, as the National Education Association preferred to put it, leading them 'away from the pursuits for which they are adapted.' The danger was largely political. By teaching the liberal arts to commoners, the new secondary schools might well become the spawning ground for [democracy]. As J. E. Russell, head of Columbia University Teachers College, put it in 1905: "How can we justify our practice in schooling the masses in precisely the same manner as we do those who are to be their leaders?" So "Woodrow Wilson, president of Princeton, sternly advised the Federation of High School Teachers: 'We want one class of persons to have a liberal education and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class of necessity in every society, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.' Since there was no way to stop 'the masses' from entering high school, the only way to meet the crisis [sabotage their education] was to prevent them from learning anything liberating when they got there. Instead, the educational leaders said, the new secondary schools should offer vocational training in particular and something called industrial education in general." Miseducation is "designed to prevent 'the masses' from ever learning in a classroom what a free people ought to know.")

Prof. Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962-4), p 332, noting that "high school textbooks, once written by college authorities in their fields, were now written by public school superintendents, high school principals and supervisors, or by students of educational methods." And: "The colleges themselves were so numerous, so competitive, so heterogeneous in quality that in their hunger for more students, they were far from vigilant in upholding the admissions standards of the past."

Bryce [1838-1922] noted that while adult literacy had improved 20-fold in the preceding 70 years, “the percentage of whose who reflect [think] before they vote has not kept pace . . . .”

Hobhouse [1864-1929] noted a prevalence among the ill-educated, “not [having] the time to think and will not take the trouble to do so if he has the time,” result: popular views reflect NOT educated fact-based concepts, but rather “the popular sheet [media] and shouting newsboy [journalist, commentator, newspaper editor] . . . To this new public . . . it is useless to appeal to reason.”

Explanation includes "those masters of America who do not want citizens, free and intelligent and self-governing, but who want the slave-hordes as they come, ignorant, inert, physically, mentally and morally helpless!," says Upton Sinclair, Profits of Religion (1917), § 3.11, p 137.

Prof. David Michael Green's "My 1933 Nightmare"
(11 August 2009), shows the "herd-mindedness" continuing. Green cites widespread "willful ignorance translated into incoherent, and in fact ironically self-defeating, rage . . . in a country populated by so many fools, people who can so readily, proudly and belligerently be made into tools of their own destruction . . . the greatest political, economic, cultural and military power on the world's stage . . . so incredibly backward at its core.") (And see related background.)

You cannot hope to bribe or twist,thank God! the British journalist.But, seeing what the man will dounbribed, there's no occasion to.

Tuchman summarized this as concern about “man's curious refusal to behave rationally in what seemed his own best interest. The low level on which the populace reacted politically, the appeal of the sensationalist press, and the new phenomeon of mass interest in spectator sports were disturbing.”

See U.S. slavery examples and war explanation examples.
The media further deteriorate public awareness by having a perverse definition of the word “news.” The media defines “news” as sensational events constituting “deviations from . . . norms” instead of “events of importance to sizeable numbers of viewers [readers/listeners].”—Byron Shafer and Richard Larson, "Did TV Create the 'Social Issue'?," Columbia Journalism Review (September/October 1972), p. 11 at 16.
Prof. Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States (New York: Harper and Row, 1980, reprinted, HarperPerennial, 1990), p 257, cites education being altered pre-Civil War to create people “to keep the system going, to be loyal buffers . . . learn obedience to authority [via] 'a factory-like system’ [with] school officials—not teachers—[being] given control over textbooks.” See also "The Educational System Was Designed to Keep Us Uneducated and Docile" (17 July 2003). This dumbed down propaganda system follows the monarchist approach of Tsarist Russia under Alexander III, for example, "The rights of universities to appoint their own professors was abolished and new legislation required the government’s approval for new syllabuses to be taught. No student was allowed to be taught History unless he had permission from the Minister of Education."
"Abolitionists were seen as enemies [who] sought to educate large segments of society . . . distributed free newspapers, and even children's primers" educating on "the Constitution, the church, and the Union," says Prof. Gerald Sorin, Abolitionism: A New Perspective (New York: Praeger, 1972), p 127. (Sorin's book has background on abolitionist idealism and "religious conviction" "impelled by the vision of a better society").
Slavers and their accessories were enraged at such education!
In essence, "the lords of the lash and lords of the loom" (Bible-Belt/Religious Right Southerners, clergy, slavers, allied with Northern big business) combined at that time, in opposition to having an educated citizenry. People who become educated learn their rights, refuse to tolerate and put up with abuses. Those two groups (Bible-Belt / Religious Right + Big Business) hated education. See, e.g., Prof. Henry A. Giroux, "Why Teaching People to Think for Themselves Is Repugnant to Religious Zealots and Rick Santorum" (22 February 2012) ("Santorum and many of his allies dislike any public institution that enables people to think critically and act with a degree of responsibility toward the public. This is one reason why they hate any notion of public education, which harbors the promise, if not the threat, of actually educating students to be thoughtful, self-reflective and capable of questioning so-called common sense and holding power accountable.")
See, for example,
Charles P. Pierce, Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free
(Anchor, 4 May 2010).
And see The Koch Brothers Exposed (Documentary, May 2012), example on the ongoing assault on public education, in context of dumbing people down, thus helping to enable pollution causing deaths, attacks on anti-pollution laws, financing pro-pollution anti-education politicians, etc. Alex "Carey [Taking the Risk Out of Democracy] demonstrates how, again and again, big business has managed to wrap itself in the flag, and inculcate hostility to unions. . . . from 1890 to 1910 . . . corporations were opposed to restrictions on immigration, since these migrants were willing to accept pretty much any work. . . . Big business split [progressives] by promoting an Americanization movement. . . . Americans just don't vacation like other people do. Western European laws require at least ten and usually more than twenty days. . . . In the United States, some of us don't get any vacation at all. Most American workers do get paid vacations from their bosses, but only twelve days on average. . . . The right to a long vacation is one of the benefits that unions and the left have in recent decades delivered to [European] Western workers—except American ones. . . . while there is no easy way to turn to regain control of a cultural commons so throughly under the sway of well heeled corporate interests, perhaps we can start to engage in small acts of reprogramming," says Yves Smith, "Why Don't Americans Take More Vacations? Blame it on Independence Day"
(Wednesday, 4 July 2012).
"Since No Child Left Behind became law, schools where there are lots of poor kids have been turned into brutal testing factories, where the focus is on raising test scores rather than raising children. Even so, the test scores inexorably reflect the economic disadvantages of poor communities, as parents each year continue to receive the federally-mandated letters telling them their schools are failing. Some parents shake their heads and shrug off the letters because they know their child’s teacher is doing the best she can. Others get frustrated and angry. And yet most of these parents do not know that Karl Rove and his little band of Texans created NCLB with their dismay and frustration in mind, in order to replace public education, or to “blow it up a bit,” as former Assistant Secretary of Education Susan Neuman told Time Magazine in 200. The idea, all along, was to use the tests, as Senator Judd Gregg mused in 2001 during final mark up of NCLB, to show that public schools are failing and, thus, to usher in “market solutions” and charter schools to replace the “failed” public schools," says Prof. James Horn (Cambridge College), "Orwellian 'Parent Trigger' Laws Have Gun Aimed at Wrong Target" (Wednesday, 8 August 2012).
"With all this there went a persistent hostility to education," says Prof. Richard Hofstadter's Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962-4), p 257. "Business waged a long, and on the whole successful, campaign for vocational and trade [school] education at the [formerly] high-school level and did much to undermine the high school as a center of liberal [academic] education," p 257. A business belief was/is "that education would only make workers discontented." So they succeeded in dumbing down higher education to "be more 'practical'" i.e., vocational and trade schoolish. The anti-education goal was cited in 1885 by businessman Henry Carey Baird thus: "'The high school' of today must . . . be supplanted [replaced] by the technical school, with possibly 'shops' connected with it," says Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism, p 258. This anti-education approach is now the norm in the U.S.A.
"A sign of the increasing vocational character of American higher education [so-called] was the emergence of both undergraduate and graduate schools of business," says Hofstadter, supra, p 263. Some few remaining pro-education academics objected, e.g., "Abraham Flexner . . . considered their heavily vocational curriculums in the main beneath the dignity of the academic enterprise," p 263. "Within the universities, business schools were often non-intellectual and at times anti-intellectual centers dedicated to a rigidly conservative set of ideas," p 263.
The Big Business + Bible-Belt / Religious Right Alliance constituted or were aiding and abetting the tobacco lobby then known as slavers. They did not want people to know the facts and their rights, e.g.,

If people were to know about the tobacco role in such evils, so many evils, they'd foreseeably not be scammed by "Religious Right," "Bible-Belt" claims professing opposition to what they were and are in fact causing, by their regular and recurring pro-tobacco actions.
The Surgeon General's colleagues noted one aspect of this back in 1977.
"When Clarence Darrow said at Scope's [evolution teaching] trial [1925] that 'every child ought to be more intelligent than his parents,' he was raising the specter that haunted the fundamentalists most," says Prof. Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962-4), p 127. "This was precisely what they did not want . . . ."
At "the time of the Dayton evolution trial . . . the brisker conservative clergymen saw that their influence and oratory and incomes were threatened by any authentic learning. A few of them were so intelligent as to know that not only was biology dangerous to their positions, but also history--which gave no very sanctified reputation to the Christian church; astronomy--which found no convenient Heaven in the skies and snickered politely at the notion of making the sun stand still in order to win a Jewish border skirmish; psychology--which doubted the superiority of a Baptist preacher fresh from the farm to trained laboratory researchers; and all the other sciences of the modern university. They saw [demand dumbing-down so] that a proper [!] school should teach nothing but [vocational, trade-schoolish] bookkeeping, agriculture, geometry. . . . This perception the clergy [called 'fundamentalists'] and their most admired laymen expressed in quick action. They organized half a dozen competent and well-financed organizations to threaten rustic state legislators with political failure and bribe them with unctuous clerical praise, so that these back-street and backwoods Solons would forbid the teaching in all state-supported schools and colleges of anything which was not approved by the evangelists," says Sinclair Lewis, Elmer Gantry (1927), Chapter XXIX, Section 9, paragraphs 1-2, p 374-375.
The Business and Religious Right / Bible Belt Alliance scam is carefully designed for distraction purposes. “. . . you don't have to be pious with us. Ma and I are a couple of old dragoons. We like religion; like the good old hymns—takes us back to the hick town we came from; and we believe religion is a fine thing to keep people in order—they think of higher things instead of all these strikes and big wages and the kind of hell-raising that's throwing the industrial system all out of kilter. And I like a fine upstanding preacher that can give a good show. . . . But we ain't pious. And any time you want to let down—and I reckon there must be times when a big cuss like you must get pretty sick of listening to the snivelling sisterhood!—you just come to us, and if you want to smoke or even throw in a little jolt of liquor, as I've been known to do, why we'll understand.” Quoted from Sinclair Lewis, Elmer Gantry (1927), Chapter XXIII, Section 2, paragraph 12, p 302. Reason: "the church is in bondage to Big Business and doctrines as laid down by millionaires," Chapter XXVII, last paragraph, p 364.
Now a century later we see the horrific results of the Bible-Belt/Big Business alliance and its ruthless, relentless war on education, their "dumbing it down." People do not know these subjects our ancestors knew, and are often scammed by the alliance's claims and political message. See, e.g., "'Climate Deniers' Follow 'Creationists' to Undermine Public Education" (Tuesday, 14 February 2012).
The Religious Right also attacks science, even on science websites with comments. So to protect scientific truth, on 24 September 2013, Popular Science Shuts Down Comments on its Website."
A "fractious minority wields enough power to skew a reader's perception of a story [on science]." Examples: "Uncivil comments not only polarized readers, but they often changed a participant's interpretation of the news story itself. In the civil group, those who initially did or did not support the technology — whom we identified with preliminary survey questions — continued to feel the same way after reading the comments. Those exposed to rude comments, however, ended up with a much more polarized understanding of the risks connected with the technology. Simply including an ad hominem attack in a reader comment was enough to make study participants think the downside of the reported technology was greater than they'd previously thought."
"It’s long been known that America’s school kids haven’t measured well compared with international peers. Now, there’s a new twist: Adults don’t either. In math, reading and problem-solving using technology – all skills considered critical for global competitiveness and economic strength – American adults scored below the international average on a global test,"
says "US adults are dumber than the average human" (Associated Press, 8 October 2013).
Sadhbh Walshe, "Are Americans Dumb? (10 October 2013) ("has a lot to do with inadequate schooling for (poor) children and teenagers and a dearth of continuing education opportunities for low-income adults. By contrast, the OECD study found that in (more equal) countries that fared better in the tests, like Finland, Denmark and the Netherlands, more than 60% of the adult population have engaged in continuing education programs or on the job training.")
Additional dumbing down includes forcing children to delay even entering into school!! For example, see Michigan Senate Bill 315 (Passed 38-0 in MI Senate 3 May 2012), to require kindergartners to be age 5 by Sept. 1 to attend kindergarten, rather than by Dec. 1 under current Michigan law. This earlier age cut-off would be phased in one month at a time over three years, starting in 2013. A child who would have been eligible under the current requirements could still attend if the parents "opt in" by notifying the school by June 1. To learn who voted for this forced dumbing down, see http://www.michiganvotes.org/RollCall.aspx?ID=614381. This contrasts sharply with past practice, when as we've seen, people age 14 could be graduating college. MI Senate Bill 315 in effect forces a five year delay from that, forces waiting until age 19!
For background on Religious Right lying, see, e.g., Chris Rodda, Liars For Jesus: The Religious Rights' Alternate Version Of American History (New Jersey: BookSurge Pub, 2006) (debunks the falsified version of American history of David Barton and other historians on the "Christian right"). See also

Upton B. Sinclair, The Profits Of Religion (1917), § 2.12 and § 3.10.
“It is to be expected that advances in physiology and psychology will give governments much more control over individual mentality than they now have even in totalitarian countries. Fitche laid it down that education should aim at destroying free will, so that, after pupils have left school, they shall be incapable, throughout the rest of their lives, of thinking or acting otherwise than as their schoolmasters would have wished. . . .”—Bertrand Russell, The Impact of Science on Society (1953), pg 49-50.
The 1850's were still an era when people were still educated, e.g., knew their constitutional rights, knew tobacco dangers. In 1836, a blunt fact had been widely circulated to Americans: the fact that doctors deemed it already well-established "that thousands and tens of thousands die of diseases of the lungs generally brought on by tobacco smoking. . . . How is it possible to be otherwise? Tobacco is a poison. A man will die of an infusion of tobacco as of a shot through the head."—Samuel Green, New England Almanack and Farmer's Friend (1836).

Prior to mass media advertising, non-smoking was "common" in the U.S.—Prof. John Hinds, The Use of Tobacco (Nashville, Tenn: Cumberland Presbyterian Publishing House, 1882), p. 10.
And, in that still educated era, instead of election campaign "sound bites," multi-hour scholarly level analyses, e.g., Lincon's Peoria-Speech-1854, were conducted. A high public knowledgeability level on rights is a threat to rights' violators, motivating destroying that educational foundation of the people-at-large, as anti-educators have accomplished.
Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt, The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America: A Chronological Paper Trail (Ravenna, Oh: Conscience Press, September 1999)
Manuel Valenzuela, "The Dumbing Down of America" (2 January 2007), cites "the dumbing down of America, the methodical destruction and purposeful elimination of the means by which a society educates and enlightens itself."
Paul Craig Roberts, Ph.D., "Polls Show Many Americans are Simply Dumber Than Bush" (29 January 2006), says "Half of the US population is incapable of acquiring, processing and understanding information. . . . half of the American population is unable to draw a rational conclusion from unambiguous facts. . . . the inability of half of the US population to acquire and understand information are far larger threats to Americans than terrorism."
"Special Report: American Schools in Crisis" (7 April 2006) ("Most Americans have no idea how bad things really are—we are in a state of emergency.")
Prof. Eric D. Hirsch, Jr., The Knowledge Deficit: Closing the Shocking Education Gap for American Children (Houghton Mifflin, 1 April 2007) ("Hirsch shows why American students perform less well than students in other industrialized countries." See also his Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know (12 April 1988), wherein "Hirsch argues that children in the U.S. are being deprived of the basic knowledge that would enable them to function in contemporary society. Includes 5,000 essential facts to know.")
Note that the U.S. "educational system was twisted into a test taking industry that is careful, above all, not to teach children how to think," says Prof. David Michael Green, in "One day you’re gonna wake up, America" (4 May 2007) (Green is Professor of Political Science at Hofstra University, New York).
Note "the huge gap between funding for military ventures and US public education,"
says Emily Spence, "We Can't Get No Educashion: A Critique Of US Public Schools" (26 August 2007).
"Why People Believe Americans Are Stupid" (November 2007)
Benjamin Grabow, "Reading's two-minute drill" (28 November 2007) ("Americans are reading less than ever . . . the average adult is reading for pleasure far less than a generation before. With so many other forms of entertainment available, literature is losing its luster. . . . a proper education is necessary to enjoy a work of literature. But two other key ingredients to prose appreciation are often overlooked: time and quiet. . . Reading must happen in two minute increments or it doesn't happen at all.")
See the issue of a recent textbook that "presents a skewed view of topics from global warming to separation of church and state," reported in the article, "Student sees political bias in high school text: Publisher now says it will review the book, as will College Board"
(AP, MSNBC, 8 April 2008).
"Roughly a third of all American high school students drop out. Another third graduate but are not prepared for the next stage of life — either productive work or some form of post-secondary education. When two-thirds of all teenagers old enough to graduate from high school are incapable of mastering college-level work, the nation is doing something awfully wrong," says Bob Herbert, "Clueless in America"
(New York Times, 22 April 2008)
A teacher was punished in 2008 for daring to teach children to think: “I teach them critical thinking.” See Juan Gonzalez, "New York 8th-Graders Boycott Practice Exam But Teacher May Get Ax" (22 May 2008). This is an example of punishing good teachers who do not indoctrinate children with robot-like drills.
A lament of the mis-education process lacking critical thinking, in political context, is given by Jacques Hardy (June 2008).
See also Prof. Paulo Freire, Pedagogyof theOppressed (1968), providing "a brilliant analysis of the way that traditional education indoctrinates students into conformity and submission to authority. Freire proposed that instead of a banking style of education, where knowledge is deposited into students, who are then required to spit it back upon demand, education worth its salt should empower students to think for themselves." (Reference).
Another "study that followed several thousand undergraduates through four years of college found that large numbers didn't learn the critical thinking, complex reasoning and written communication skills that are widely assumed to be at the core of a college education," says "Study: Many college students not learning to think critically" (18 January 2011). "Many of the students graduated without knowing how to sift fact from opinion, make a clear written argument or objectively review conflicting reports of a situation or event, according to New York University sociologist Richard Arum, lead author of the study. The students, for example, couldn't determine the cause of an increase in neighborhood crime or how best to respond without being swayed by emotional testimony and political spin."
"Although higher education understands the need to develop critical thinkers, it has not lived up to the task consistently. Students are graduating deficient in these skills, unprepared to think critically once in the workforce. Limited development of cognitive processing skills leads to less effective leaders," says "Deficient Critical Thinking Skills among College Graduates: Implications for leadership," by Kevin L. Flores, Gina S. Matkin, Mark E. Burbach, Courtney E. Quinn, and Heath Harding (October 2011). "Most pedagogy is content-based built on deep knowledge. Successful critical thinking pedagogy is moving away from this paradigm, teaching students to think complexly."
Marion Brady, "The Biggest Problem With Traditional Schooling" (The Washington Post, Sunday, 17 June 2012) ("the single biggest problem kids face with traditional schooling is information overload. So much random, disorganized, disconnected information is dumped on them they can't come even close to coping with it. . . . most schooling doesn't "take," [and] kids are usually bored and disengaged, [and] adults remember and use so little of what they once "learned" in school at great expense.")
America being dumbed down is linked to U.S. religious fundamentalism by Susan Jacoby, The Age of American Unreason: Dumbing Down and the Future of Democracy (London: Old Street Publishing, 2008), and George Monbiot, "Why Morons Succeed in US Politics" (The Guardian, 28 October 2008). See also Prof. Richard Hofstadter's Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962-4), pp 15, 19, 47, 94-96, 117-121, 125-130, and 150-151.
During the 1950's purges, "universities . . . ousted . . . thousands of . . . professors [to] decimate the country's intellectual life," says Chris Hedges, M.Th., "The Origin ofAmerica’s Intellectual Vacuum" (Truthdig, 15 November 2010). " The purges, most carried out internally and away from public view, announced to everyone inside the universities that dissent was not protected. The confrontation of ideas was killed. 'Political discourse has been impoverished since then.' . . . . The result is an impoverishment of ideas and analysis at a moment when we desperately need radical voices to make sense of the corporate destruction of the global economy and the ecosystem. . . . . 'Ideas which were on the agenda a hundred years ago and sixty years ago have dropped out of memory . . . .'"
"Religious right" fundamentalists have a long history of hating education and books. They have a long record as book burners. For example, re the classic Roman library, the Serapeum, it had "hundreds of thousands of scrolls and codices dealing with history, natural science, and literature." "Christian" book-burners destroyed it; it "was in fact brought to ruination by a throng of Christ worshippers, led by the bishop Theophilus in A.D. 391. This was at a time when the ascendant Christian church was shutting down the ancient academies and destroying libraries and books throughout the [Roman] empire." See Michael Parenti, Ph.D., The Assassination of Julius Caesar: A People’s History of Ancient Rome (New York: The New Press, 2003), p 155. "Theophilius proceeded to demolish the [building] The valuable library of Alexandria was pillaged or destroyed; and, near twenty years afterwards, the appearance of the empty shelves excited the regret and indignation of every spectator whose mind was not totally darkened by religious prejudice," says Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, XXXVIII, p 891, cited in Parenti, Caesar, pp 155-156.
Note that "the Romans [had had] libraries of up to 500,000 volumes. But under Christian hegemony, laypersons were regularly forbidden access to books, the profession of copyist disappeared . . . [b]y the sixth century, the largest monastic libraries contained collections numbering a paltry 200 to 600 books, predominantly religious in content," p 156. Note that "the Christian church actually was the major purveyor of . . . ignorance. Christianity's crusade to eradicate . . . scholarship . . . was not only directed against historiography but carried over into the suppression of astronomy, biology, mathematics, medicine, anatomy, philosophy, literature, theater, music and art," Parenti, Caesar, pp 156-157.
"Once Christianity gained ascendancy as the official religion under Emperor Constantine, Rome's twenty-eight public libraries 'like tombs, were closed forever,' laments noted fourth-century . . . historian Ammianus Marcellinus, cited in Parenti, Caesar, p 156.
"The burning of books was part of the advent and imposition of Christianity," says Luciano Canfora, The Vanished Library, p 192, cited in Parenti, Caesar, p 155.
For more on their hatred of learning, see, e.g., Michael Parenti, Ph.D., History as Mystery (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1999), pp 44-47 and 95-103.
A lament of America's dumbing down is given by Chris Hedges, M.Th., in "America the Illiterate" (November 2008), citing loss of emphasis on reading and in-depth thought, and instead mere images and superficiality.
See also his "The Perversion of Scholarship" (30 July 2012), noting that "Fraternities, sororities and football, along with other outsized athletic programs, have decimated most major American universities. Scholarship, inquiry, self-criticism, moral autonomy and a search for artistic and esoteric forms of expression—in short, the world of ethics, creativity and ideas—are shouted down by the drunken chants of fans in huge stadiums, the pathetic demands of rich alumni for national championships, and the elitism, racism and rigid definition of gender roles of Greek organizations. . . . "
A lament of public ignorance of the Civil War is in the Book Review by Luther Spoehr: Review of Gary W. Gallagher's Causes Won, Lost, & Forgotten: How Hollywood and Popular Art Shape What We Know About the Civil War (University of North Carolina Press, 2008).
Prof. James Mulhern, A History of Education (New York: Ronald Press Co, 1946) (647 pages), summarizes the “course [on past, present, and future] of education [and its having changed, and why] for students at the University of Pennsylvania for the past twenty years [meaning, 1926-1946].”
For information on education officials “during the past forty or fifty years [having deliberately] removed from the curriculum [classic teaching on] the Western culture which produced the modern democratic state,” and replaced that curriculum with an “egoist, careerist, specialist [trade-school] and asocial” curriculum, see Walter Lippmann, B.A. (Harvard, 1910), “Education vs. Western Civilization,” 10 The American Scholar (#2) 184-193, especially pp 184 and 190 (Spring 1941).
Ask yourself about so-called "high school education" nowadays, is it what our ancestors deemed mere "trade school"? leaving people unprepared to serve as citizens, e.g., to vote intelligently?
“[H. G. Wells] feared that the average citizen could never be educated or aware enough to decide the major issues of the world. Therefore he favored the vote be limited to scientists, organizers, engineers, and others of merit.”—Herbert George (H. G.) Wells (1866-1946).
For more on deteriorated education and myth, see

J. Carleton Bell and David F. McCollum, in Journal of Educational Psychology (May 1917) (finding only a 16-49% knowledge rate)

Upton Sinclair, The Goose-step: A StudyofAmericanEducation (1923), (“a bandit crew have got hold of it [the U.S. education system] and have set it to work, not for your benefit, nor the benefit of your sons and daughters, but for ends very far from these? [thus the youth] are being taught, deliberately and of set purpose, not wisdom but folly, not justice but greed, not freedom but slavery, not love but hate?”) (Excerpt, Chapters XLIV-XLV.)

Upton Sinclair, The Goslings:
A Study of the AmericanSchools (1924) (“The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States, whatever pretensions of politicians, pedagogues other such mountebanks, and that is its aim everywhere else. . . . The public schools, which originated in Prussia . . .
have the . . . aim [purpose] of putting down political and economic heresy. Their purpose, in brief, is to make docile . . . citizens.”—H. L. Mencken.)

"Ignorance of U.S. History Shown by College Freshmen," New York Times (4 April 1943) (finding only a 6-25% knowledge rate)

William Clyde DeVane, Ph.D., "American Education After the War" (The Yale Review, Summer 1943) ("Neither government nor industry is to be trusted in education. They would inevitably seek their own purposes. . . . Industry would make our children robots and tenders of machines. The government would . . . reduce higher education to a mediocrity which it has not yet reached in America. We should have then no standard-bearers left, and no hope of better things.")

Herman and Julia R. Schwendinger, The Sociologists of the Chair: A Radical Analysis of the Formative Years of North American Sociology (1883-1922) (New York: Basic Books, 1974) (on the suppression of many important social scientists in the formative years of North American sociology) (Summary; site also has other unrelated material)

Frances FitzGerald, America Revised: History Schoolbooks in the Twentieth Century (Atlantic/Little, Brown, 1979) ("She has pored through the pages of hundreds of . . . American history textbooks, something nobody, I believe, has ever done before. She describes their contents, delineates their overall "philosophy," and shows how they changed from generation to generation." [Review])

Prof. Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987) ("our students have lost the practice of and the taste for reading. They have not learned how to read, nor do they have the expectation of delight or improvement from reading," p 62. "Teachers of writing . . . have told me that they cannot teach writing to students who do not read, and that it is practically impossible to get them to read, let alone like it. This is where high schools have failed most," p 65. And "most high school graduates nowadays have difficulty reading and writing," p 341. Having to teach remedial reading "is merely a high [grade] school function that our sad state of educational affaris has thrust upon" colleges, p 341.

P. Philip Meranto, Oneida Meranto, Ph.D., and Matthew Lippman, Guarding the Ivory Tower: Repression and Rebellion in Higher Education (1985) (on ousting university faculty who wish to teach beyond the dumbed-down level, thus reducing the educational level of students who later become grade/high school teachers)

Prof. Michael Parenti, Ph.D., AgainstEmpire (1995), Chapter 10, "The Empire in Academia," pp 175-196 (on the systematic elimination of university faculty who wish to teach beyond the dumbed-down level, thus reducing the educational level of students who later become grade/high school teachers)

"Third International Mathematics and Science Study" (Fall 1998) (cites "precipitous decline in U.S. student performance between the fourth and eighth grades" . . . "right in that middle third of their pre-university training [grades 5-7, U.S. schools] drop the ball and stop challenging them intellectually" . . . "In mathematics, American students could outperform only two nations—Cyprus and South Africa")

Maureen Sout, The Feel-Good Curriculum: The Dumbing-Down of America's Kids in the Name of Self-Esteem (Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus Books, 2000)

Sam Wineburg (U. of Stanford Prof of Educ), Journal of American History (2004)

Jay Mathews, "Most students struggle with U.S. history," Washington Post, cited in The Detroit News (14 March 2004), p 13A.

Report of the Program for International Student Assessment (2005) (shows U.S. tied for 27th place, with Latvia, re student mathematics performance, vs Hong Kong in 1st place; tied for 22nd place, with Austria, re science, vs Finland and Japan tied for 1st place).

Stephen Bitsoli, "Can U.S. Students Make Gains in Math, Science?," Macomb Daily (26 March 2006), p 2C (citing Prof. William Schmidt on poor US education quality)

Kurt Nimmo, "Dumbed Down Americans: Chattel for Global Tyranny" (3 May 2006) (many Americans ignorant of geography, map-reading, directions. "Accord- ing to the Connecticut census of 1840, only one citizen out of every 579 was illiterate and you probably don’t want to know, not really, what people in those days considered literate; it’s too embarrassing. Popular novels of the period give a clue: Lastof the Mohicans, published in 1826, sold so well that a contemporary equivalent would have to move 10 million copies to match it. If you pick up an uncut version you find yourself in a dense thicket of philosophy, history, culture, manners, politics, geography, analysis of human motives and actions, all conveyed in data-rich periodic sentences so formidable only a determined and well-educated reader can handle it nowadays.")

Dana Goldstein, The Teacher Wars: A History of America's Most Embattled Profession (2 September 2014) ("This 175-year history reveals the political and cultural baggage that has long been tied to teaching in America." And, "countries like Finland and South Korea [have] students [who] consistently outscore Americans on standardized tests, and [Americans] wonder what we are doing wrong. In The Teacher Wars, Dana Goldstein chronicles 175 years of teaching in America to address this crucial issue. Goldstein reveals political and cultural baggage that has long been tied to teaching through issues ranging from the feminization of teaching in the 1800s to recent innovations like Teach for America. And she argues that ambivalence about teachers and expectations that schools should compensate for poverty’s ills have driven the most ambitious people from becoming teachers.")

Prof. Noam Chomsky, "Why Americans Know So Much About Sports But So Little About World Affairs" (1988, reprinted 16 September 2014) ("They might as well live in a fantasy world, and that's in fact what they do")
Educational deterioration includes abolishing the majority of the permanent university level faculty, replacing with temporaries, "adjuncts," low paid, without offices or credibility. See Claire Goldstene, "The Emergent Academic Proletariat and its Shortchanged Students," in Dissent: A Quarterly of Politics and Culture (14 August 2013).
"The United States’ best schools are mediocre compared to their international peers," says Joy Pullmann, "Six Lies Most People Believe About U.S. Schools" (23 September 2013). "The United States’ best schools are mediocre compared to their international peers. . . . The Global Report Card has recently layered specific, nationwide figures upon broader comparisons that have long demonstrated our mediocrity. Its authors give Beverly Hills as one example. It represents most affluent suburban districts, which Americans typically think contain great schools. But they don’t. “If Beverly Hills were relocated to Canada, it would be at the 46th percentile in math achievement, a below-average district. If the city were in Singapore, the average student in Beverly Hills would only be at the 34th percentile…” The schools everyone thinks are so great are only so because we compare them to our truly awful urban districts, rather than to actual peers. In short, America suffers from the Lake Wobegon effect" [the pretense that everyone is above average. The Big Business - Religious Right - Tobacco Lobby Alliance has abolished content, on the false claim that] "Schools should teach generic skills like “critical thinking” and “real-world application," not require "merely memorizing content.” The reality is, "Unfortunately, as [E. D.] Hirsch [Jr.] shows [in Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know], there are no skills that apply to any knowledge indiscriminately. Believing that, however plausible it sounds, is the intellectual equivalent of asking a carpenter to apply his chiseling skills to gardening, or horseback riding. Knowledge acquisition must be systematic and focused, and requires memory. You cannot have great reading skill that applies equally to a passage about the Civil War and to one about the lifecycle of amoebae. Your ability to read and understand any given passage depends on your background knowledge about the subject. In short, you cannot be a critical thinker without anything to think with or about."
For information on results of the deteriorated educational system, exacerbated by the sensationalist media, e.g., that many in the public are unable to articulate reasons for picking a specific political party or candidate, beyond perhaps one specific point, if they remember the in-process election at all, see Prof. Herbert Asher, Presidential Elections and American Politics: Voters, Candidates and Campaigns Since 1952 (Homewood, Ill.: Dorsey Press, 1976), pp 93-94.
Law school has markedly deteriorated. It used to be, to become an attorney, a minimum of 16 years for civil practice; and to be an apprentice, 7 years. Reference: Baron J. Campbell and Richard Hildreth, Lives of Judges 1300's - 1600's (1849, 1856), pp 21-22. Now you can be a 'lawyer' (with a so-called law “doctorate” no less!) in a mere three years!
Note NAS Report on College Deterioration 1955 vs 2002. College now is at 1955 high school level, meaning a four grade deterioration, with 12th grade at old 8th grade level.
Hint: for “truth in education,” rename your area's alleged “high school,” as a “trade school.”
The American South has been behind much of the anti-education effort; it has even alleged the Bible as reason for being anti-education! “A prominent
Virginia Episcopal clergyman, the Reverend [Cleland] Kinloch Nelson [1852-1917], had fought public education and labeled it 'essentially communistic.'” [!!] Source: Paul Craig Roberts, Ph.D., "The Brown Decision," para. 34 (1 May 1997). U.S. President James "Buchanan [1857-1861] felt that there were too many educated people in the country and vetoed a bill which would have created more colleges." Source: "The Four Worst American Presidents" (30 September 2013).
See also Chuck Thompson, Better Off Without Em: A Northern Manifesto for Southern Secession (Simon & Schuster, 14 August 2012) ("for anyone fed up with the Confederate influence on the national discourse." "In a chapter on the condition of education in the South, Thompson writes passionately and persuasively about the disastrous long-term effects that de facto segregation and systematic underfunding of public schools will have on the US economy.” Makes “a convincing case that the American South is essentially a separate country that negatively affects the rest of the United States." "Racism is everywhere, but in the South it's the not-so-subtle motivation behind 'Christian academies' and the subtle motivation behind the closing of an historic all-black elementary school in Biloxi because it outperforms white schools." "In between statistics are a lot of stories like the one of the Maryland black state senator from ten years ago who stopped in a Florida bar and was told 'we serve blacks in the back room.' In short, the South is full of racism and uneducated people many for which the 'War of northern aggression' happened yesterday.")
(N Y Times Review)
Such anti-education bias is the opposite of the fact that "It costs less money to build schools than jails." Educated people smoke less, thus commit fewer crimes. And note another irrational Southern quote: "But what if it turns out that the State's involvement in schools is one of the things which necessitates the expenditure in jails?" [!!] Source: Rev. Robert L. Dabney (1820-1898), Discussions, 1876, Vol 4, p 195. Dabney's view is nonsense, typical of the widespread slaver psychosis. The oppposite is true. But that viewpoint has wholly taken over America, politicians would rather vote for cops-punishments-prisons than education!, hence education's severe deterioration.
For other anti-education sites, see

Upton Sinclair, The Goose-step: A StudyofAmericanEducation (1923), (“a bandit crew have got hold of it [the U.S. education system] and have set it to work, not for your benefit, nor the benefit of your sons and daughters, but for ends very far from these? [thus the youth] are being taught, deliberately and of set purpose, not wisdom but folly, not justice but greed, not freedom but slavery, not love but hate?”) (Excerpt, Chapters XLIV-XLV)

Prof. Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1962).
And note an example of media censorship of news, traceable back over a century.
Lacking proper education, people become easy prey for propaganda (disinformation, distortion, half-truths, etc., as distinct from legitimate data presented in appropriate context). Note examples by historians. Danish analyst Dr. Georg Brandes (1842-1927), The World at War (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1917), p 170, said: “The sound sense of the masses and their intuitive conception of right have never been anything but a democratic legend. For the masses believe, as a rule, every lie that is cleverly presented to them.”—Later cited with approval by Historian Clinton H. Grattan (1902-1980), Why We Fought (New York: Vanguard Press, 1929, 1957), 71, adding, “. . . propagandists counted heavily on the naiveté of the civil populations of all countries and of the American public in particular. It can hardly be said that their [propagandists'] confidence [in public gullibility, inability to identify propaganda as such] was misplaced.” (See details).
In 1920's Germany, for example, students were taught "violence. How mean-minded, cruel, corrupt and gluttonous the university man [student] is has been shown clearly by Harry Domela [1904-1978], a middle-class youth, who once mistaken for a younger son of the Kaiser [Wilhelm II], attended Heidelberg University as a pruince, lived with the students, attended duels, orgies, secret meetings where hatred of the middle and lower classes was [taught]," says George Seldes, You Can't Print That: The Truth behind the News 1918-1928 (Garden City, NY: Garden City Pub Co, 1929), Part VI, Chapter III, p 418. The referenced book is entitled Der Falsche Prinz: Leben und Abenteuer (Berlin: Malik-verlag, 1927), transl. as A Sham Prince: The Life and Adventures of Harry Domela . . . (London: Hutchinson & Co., Ltd., 1928).
Education is now so deteriorated that for communication with leaders such as politicians, content is a mere 10%!! Non-verbal communication is 60%! with vocal tonality, pitch, and pauses 30%. Recall is a mere 25%. Reference: Stanley Zareff, "Literally Speaking," 14 Worth (#1) 46-48 (January 2005).
Parallel to this fact, even if education were not deteriorated, politicians are typically not scholars, but “good ole boys” who prefer drinking, schmoozing, BS-ing to honest scholarly research into actual research-based and professional truths. Politicians often act on “whims, fancy, and sudden childish notions.” Awareness is at ignorant level, typically “does not know about” key factors. They listen with “little attention,” react with “remarkable irrelevancy” to reality due to “ignorance.” There is “a special failure of communication in dealing with heads of state.” “It is a feature of government that the more important the problem, the further [up the political structure] it tends to be removed from handling from anyone well acquainted with the subject.”—Barbara W. Tuchman, Stilwell and the American Experience in China (New York: Macmillan Co, 1970), pp 241, 404, 405, 464, respectively. [For more on politicians, click here.]
For an example of how this widespread politician trait harms, note that Michigan politicians (professing to aid the economy!), dealt it a devastating permanent blow as noted at our Wendling site.
In 1971, the Royal College of Physicians of London, in its book Smoking and Health Now (London: Pitman Medical and Scientific Publishing Co, 1971), p 9, found the smoking-caused death toll a "holocaust" due to the then "annual death toll of some 27,500." Instead of wanting to end this Holocaust then, politicians too often, Reichstag enabling-act style, want not to end it, but to prolong and intensify it.
Readers, it is your life that is at stake. Seek protection, as the Constitution already mandates in your favor.

Examples on How to Test 'Tobacco Program' AuthenticityA number of programs claim to 'educate' on tobacco.
Here are some criteria, some points to look for, to test
whether a program is genuinely educational or not.

A Fake Program, Surreptitiously Giving the Tobacco Lobby Side Under the Pretended Guise of Anti-Tobacco Education

Note: Many who purport to provide information on tobacco are
unqualified, have not studied the subject themselves in a
professional or thorough manner, so (professing to be 'sincere')
simply pass on prevalent mythology and disinformation.
We would not accept 'sincere, well-meaning' as a substitute
for educated competence in ANY other subject matter: medicine,
physics, chemistry, engineering, etc., etc., etc.
Don't accept it on tobacco: demand real teaching,
as identified above. After training, the learners
should be able to make a presentation as least
as good as in 1889 (as cited in Legislative Report)!
Tips on Urging School Officials to Act:

a. 'You have security personnel. Tell them cigarettes are illegal, so enforce along those lines, keep the contraband wholly off school premises.'

b. 'You want more revenue sharing. Well, have your Lansing lobbyists push for MCL § 750.27, MSA § 28.216, to be enforced, then Lansing will have substantial funds for you.'

d. 'Have—in economics and history classes—sessions on the history of the awareness of tobacco damage to the Michigan economy caused by the non-enforcement of the law. They can use our reference bibliography .

On Smokers' Rights Employment Laws

Ed. Note: So-called "smokers' rights" laws will foreseeably be ruled unconstitutional. They violate the U.S. Constitution and federal supremacy. The federal government mandates job safety by the Occupational Safety and Health Act, 29 USC § 651 - § 678. That law forbids preventable and foreseeable hazards. It mandates a duty to eliminate hazards including behaviors or substances to which regular exposure foreseeably leads to "material impairment of [employee] health," of which tobacco smoke is the most notorious example. The federal mandate is "unqualified and absolute," National Rlty. & C. Co, Inc v Occ. Safety & Health Rev Commission, 160 US App DC 133, 141; 489 F2d 1257, 1265 (1973).

P 1267 says, "To establish a violation of the general duty clause, hazardous conduct need not actually have occurred, for a safety program's feasibly curable inadequacies may sometimes be demonstrated before employees have acted dangerously."

P 1268 says, "Because employers have a general duty to do virtually everything possible to prevent and repress hazardous conduct by employees, violations exist almost everywhere."

Pp 1266-7, n 37, say, "we emphasize that an instance of hazardous employee conduct may be considered preventable even if no employer could have detected the conduct, or its hazardous character, at the moment of its occurrence. Conceivably, such conduct might have been precluded through feasible precautions concerning the hiring, training, and sanctioning [disciplining] of employees."

When an employer fails to control, prevent, hazardous conduct, and a "natural and probable consequence" such as death results, criminal charges are foreseeable, say People v Hegedus, 432 Mich 598; 443 NW2d 127 (1989); and People v Chicago Magnet Wire Corp, 126 Ill 2d 356; 128 Ill Dec 517; 534 NE2d 962 (1989), cert den sub nom Asta v Illinois, 493 US 809; 110 S Ct 52; 107 L Ed 2d 21 (1989) (and wrongful death lawsuits).
See also International Union, UAW v General Dynamics Land Systems Division, 259 US App DC 369; 815 F2d 1570 (1987) cert den 484 US 976; 108 S Ct 485; 98 L Ed 2d 484 (1987) (mandating employer compliance with both the general duty clause and specific standards); and People v General Dynamics Land Sys Div, 175 Mich App 701; 438 NW2d 359 (1989) lv app den 435 Mich 860 (1990) (criminal charges under state law as well for neglect to obey both).
In charging an employer, for example, conviction could arise from a showing of, e.g., smokers' known higher accident rate,
alcoholism and drunk driving, drug abuse, mental disorders, AIDS, violent and criminal propensities, thus foreseeable, and that the employer had hired anyway, and one or more of these type harms had resulted.
An unconstitutional state "smokers' rights" law is no protection against a federal charge.
“An unconstitutional act is not law; it confers no rights; it imposes no duties; affords no protection; creates no office. It is in legal contemplation, as inoperative as though it had never been passed.” Norton v Shelby County, Tennessee, 118 US 425, 442; 6 S Ct 1121; 30 L Ed 178 (1886).
“All laws which are repugnant to the Constitu-tion are null and void.” Marbury v Madison, 5 US (2 Cranch) 137, 174, 176; 2 LE 60 (1803). "Where rights secured by the Constitution [i.e., as mandated by federal safety law] are involved, there can be no rule making or legislation which would abrogate them.” Miranda v Arizona, 384 US 436, 491; 86 S Ct 1602; 16 L Ed 2d 694 (1966).
So-called "smokers' rights" laws are also unconstitutional for another reason. They are based on "junk science." Legislators, typically uneducated themselves, do not go by and adhere to medical and science facts when they pass such ignorant laws. A long line of precedents rejects "junk science":

eventually reaching the Supreme Court, Daubert v Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc, 509 US 579; 113 S Ct 2786; 125 L Ed 2d 469 (28 June 1993). Politicians' laws on this subject do not meet even this minimal standard, of having expert medical fact-based findings: even "an expert who supplies nothing but a bottom line [as such laws do] supplies nothing of value to the judicial process. . . . [you] would not accept from . . . students or those who submit papers to [a professional] journal an essay containing neither facts nor reasons; why should a court rely on the sort of exposition the scholar would not tolerate in his professional life?" Mid-State Fertilizer Co v Exchange National Bank, 877 F2d 1333, 1339 (CA 7, 1989).
Pursuant to the legal duty to avoid "negligent hiring," human resources professionals in the hiring business do not seek merely absence of negative data on an applicant. They also seek affirmative positive statements of non-dangerousness to self/others. This is a good human resources management principle. See William J. Connelly, "How To Navigate The River Of Legal Liability When Hiring," Personnel Journal, Vol 63, pp 32-46, especially p 38 (March 1986).
Thus a significant body of case law exists on the duty to do proper hiring. People who are unlawfully hurt, injured, or worse, by dangerous workers who should not have been hired in the first place, are entitled to sue, to win, and to obtain redress. Pertinent cases and case collections include but are not limited to the following:

Annot., 44 ALR4th 603 (1984).
You have a right to life. The above principles and precedents exist for your protection. So-called "smokers' rights" laws are written, intended, enabling-act style, to repeal your rights against smokers' dangerousness.
Smokers' foreseeabledangerousness is tantamount to a dangerous communicable disease endangering you: "'dangerousness' must be considered identifiable . . . and although not a 'disease' as that term is commonly used, may affect third persons in much the same sense as a disease may be communicable.'”—McIntosh v Milano, 168 N J Super 466; 403 A2d 500 (1979). States thus cannot constitutionally pass "smokers' rights" laws for the reason that doing so, foreseeably violates your right to life, due to smokers' aforesaid foreseeable dangerousness. Governmental enabling acts aiding and abetting private individuals in violating a right are unconstitutional, e.g., when “. . . States have made available to [private] individuals the full coercive power of government to deny” other individuals (here, endangered nonsmokers) their rights.--Shelley v Kraemer, McGhee v Sipes, 334 US 1, 19; 68 S Ct 836; 92 L Ed 1161 (1948). Your right to life has priority! States cannot aid and abet the causing of deaths, your death, as doing so violates your Constitutional rights, including taking your No. 1 property, your life, away without due process of law, contrary to, e.g., the Bill of Rights, e.g., the 5th, 7th, and 9th Amendments.
If you are seeking to have a workforce such as Edison, Ford, and others had; if you are planning a no-smokers' hired policy; or, e.g., if you are testifying before some official body, or are perhaps opposing an unemployment compensation claim by a smoker, here are some tips:

Point out that smoking is a recognized disease, addiction, mental disorder, a particularly bad type of such, one that is not only impacting upon, and dangerous to, the diseased person, but to others and to property.

Point out that requiring sanity of one's employees is a valid normal requirement, one the government has for its own officials! The FBI routinely does psychiatric record screenings for various governmental appointees. It is OK to ask about, even to require, sanity as a minimum qualification requirement! Edison did!

Smoking regularly violates others' right to pure air, creates nuisances. Just as other employers require their employees to not be a discredit, i.e., to set a good example off-duty, you can too.

Note similarity to other requirements with respect to off-duty activity, e.g., requiring a license, a degree, a certification, etc., all of which are obtained off the job, indeed, long before the specific employer and job at issue. Employer requirements concerning past off-the job, even pre-job, activity are the norm, indeed, such are the sole basis for initial hirings in the first place!

Being economical with employer funds is a job requirement for all.

Where cigarette selling is illegal, smokers are aiding and abetting the unlawful activity.

Where cigarette buying is illegal (perhaps by youth), note the applicant record in this regard, e.g., a pattern of disregard of law; or of disproportionate propensity to buy for underage youths.

A no-smoking requirement is like any other qualification requirement.

Recognize in your explaining or testifying to any of this, to, e.g., judges, legislators, adjudicators, recognize their low level of education, below what prior generations considered grade school level, such that you will have to severely 'dumb down' your presentation or testimony to their low impaired level of education and understanding. Prepare by, e.g., reading what children used to be taught, what fifth-graders were taught, what upper elementary children were taught! Don't be taken by surprise by legislators', judges', adjudicators' foreseeable, ignorance; be prepared.

Speak slowly. Recognize that hearers do not know the pertinent words, the vocabulary, have generally never heard it, much less, understand it.
Many states' politicians have passed so-called "smokers' rights employment laws. They do this despite the obvious to everyone else fact that: "Employers look for the best and brightest to fill their ranks" -- a quote from Reader's Digest, March 2005, "All in a Days' Work," p 70. As with the word "No," what is it about this simple concept that so many politicians cannot comprehend?